Lately, there have been two semantic web widgets for Opera:

• Widgnaut, a widget version of FOAFNAUT (FOAF visualiser)
• Tabulator, a widget version of TBL’s tabulator(generic RDF browser)

Both of these seem to work much better than their webpage equivalents.

So there is a use for these widget things after all?

openacademia is an initiative to collect, share, publish and manage bibliographical information, the Semantic Web-way.

Information about scientific publications is often maintained by individual researchers. Reference management software such as EndNote and Bibtex help researchers to maintain a personal collection of bibliographic references. (These are typically references to one’s own publications and also those that have been read and cited by the researcher in his own work.)

Just had a quick look at openacademia.org. Wonderful – and a great use of the simile timeline.

Simile at MIT have recently come up with a timeline widget api – google maps for timelines. It lets you plot events and time ranges (taken from either XML or JSON) onto timelines, and it’s all pretty darn good.

It should facilitate all kinds of interesting visualisations. There are a few really interesting examples up already – my favourite is the timeline of the shooting of JFK.